Part 49

Freedom and Peace came to the War-ridden City of the Prince of Peace with the Wire Road and the Pipe-Line. To a mixed and breathlessly-waiting queue of strangely-variegated nationalities, (per medium of a standpipe, an A.S.C Sergeant and a turn-tap) the Nile waters--cool and pure, if strongly flavoured with chlorine, were dispensed, and sent flowing through Jerusalem.... Fulfilling the ancient Egyptian prophecy, that when the waters of the Nile should flow into Palestine--there should arise in the West a prophet, one Al-Nebi, who should capture the Holy City that sits on three limestone hilltops of old Judæa--and deliver the land from the loathed dominion of the Turk.

This having yet to be done, he went away to do it! perhaps with a passing smile at the breach in the City Wall made for the theatrical entry of the German No-Emperor in 1898. His was the motive power behind the long lines of moving men toiling northward under their packs through the mud of Judæa, the long trains of groaning baggage- and water-camels, the processions of waggons drawn by complaining mules, the caterpillar-wheeled lorries, carrying tons upon tons of food and ammunition, the Staff cars carrying red-tabbed officers swiftly from point to point....

He was consolidating his positions on the Jerusalem-Shechem Road, and thrusting his cavalry over the Jordan, while a Sergeant and file of Military Police combed Alexandria for a defaulting London Territorial, Acting Sergeant John Hazel, of the Fenchurch Street Regiment,--who had failed to return to the Front at the end of the fortnight's leave. He was moving on Bethlehem, while the defaulter lay delirious on a string-bed, swathed in sheets of wet boracic wadding--in the house of a Jew of Shechem. One Benjamin Sebastia, a small dealer in precious stones, and a loyal friend to Esther Hazaël--otherwise known to readers of this tale as the Mother of Ugliness.

The cellar in Benjamin Sebastia's house had often served as a hiding-place, being clean and dry and fairly free from stinks. Through its thick stone walls no curious ear could catch the sick man's ravings--when he called on certain Big Old Men to come to the rescue--or poured mad love-words in the imaginary ear of a woman named Katharine....

It seemed, he thought, poor crazed and suffering wretch! that he had kept back from a man named Yaill a certain letter and, carrying out a rescue by his own unaided hand, had claimed reward of this service from the aforesaid Katharine. Through the long days and the longer nights, when the scourge of self-reproach for this imaginary baseness bit deep into the tortured soul housed in the tortured body, the woman who sat beside him never once failed to answer:

"But, John Hazaël, my cousin, thou didst not do the thing!"

"Did I not? ... Is that true?" he would ask her over and over. "But I wished to, I desired to...."

"And desiring, thou didst resist."

"That is good--if it be true...."

"It is true. Does Esther ever lie to thee?"

"No!" he would groan, lying there in his helplessness. "Now tell me again how I was found, and brought to this place?"

"When--" (she would lay fresh pieces of soaked lint on the huge, swollen body, or ease the perpetual, torturing thirst with some cool, refreshing drink.) "When I ran away from Kir Saba, back to Shechem, I found--"

"That I," there is a smile on the shapeless mouth--"that I had kept my word to thee, and taken the head of the dog! I think the people did not weep? ..."

"Nay. It was as the passing of a plague--the lifting of a shadow--and the soldiers who had guarded the Wired Place openly rejoiced. Many being set down for beating, and fines, and so forth--because of neglect in the matter of keeping watch, on the night of the Sidi's escape...."

"They got good rest that night, I think? ..."

"So good," she gives her little rustling laugh, "that all of them swear they were bewitched, or that some friend of the Sidi's drugged the rations sent from the Barracks--so that they slept like the Seven, and waked to find him gone. So they were glad the Bey was dead.... Especially the _sabtiehs_ of his command were glad, for their old _bimbashi_ is now Commandant--and his name hath favour among them--he being a merciful man."

"A merciful Turk is a rare bird," the formless mouth says grimly. "And so--no suspicion attaching to her name--or thine--the Dervish remaining silent--thou didst bribe the Gipsy woman of the Bazâr to go with thee to the hut in the Wired Place, and take my body away...."

"Paying a price to the soldiers in the name of certain Jewish townsfolk, who--it being known among them that thou wert a Jew!--would have buried thee decently. And when--thinking thee a corpse--I leaned over thee to cut away the knotted rag that hid the Signet of Hazaël, from the cord by which thou hadst hung it round thy neck--I saw, by the Mercy of the Most High!--that thou wert still breathing. And even as I myself was brought into this place of hiding, I and Inaini the Gipsy, carried thee here that night.... Some help I gave in the sickness of her child, she hath never forgotten. May the Most High reward her! ... What had we done without her strong arms to lift thee, and her poultices of healing herbs.... Now sleep, for thou hast talked enough! See how thy poor heart shakes thee! ..."

"One question more...." The puffy lips are blue, and he labours in his breathing: "When shall I be able to stand again on these elephant's feet of mine? ..."

She swallows her tears and answers:

"Soon, it may be.... Only be content, only wait a little longer!"

And propped on high-piled pillows, he promises obediently, looking down his long misshapen bulk at his huge distorted feet.

"Very well! I will wait a little longer. Thou hast money to meet the charges?"

"Plenty as yet, my cousin--without touching the sum that was in the belt thou gavest me to keep. Tell me one thing.... If thou couldst be moved--whither wouldst thou be carried, we escaping under cover of night from this unhappy place? ..."

"To somewhere near Jerusalem," says the thick voice, feebly.

"To Jerusalem? ..."

She starts and looks at him, but the black eyes under their calloused lids are fixed upon the opposite wall.

"I said to somewhere near there. I may not go to the City until I get a message from One who is my Friend...."

"He has come there with the British since the Turks were driven out of the City? ..."

The black eyes slowly move to meet hers. He shakes his scarred head:

"Nay. He has been waiting there for long--a very long time.... But when I get a Sign from Him, then I must go up...."

"There is some great reason compelling thee?"

"There is something waiting for me at Jerusalem. I was told it that night in the wooden hut. Tell me"--the voice is like a child's--"if I cannot move, how shall I obey the Sign when it comes to me? ..."

She soothes him, thinking that his pain and weakness make him wander.

"Leave all to me. To-morrow may find thee strong. Only rest and sleep now! ..."

And he sleeps, with heavy broken breaths of utter exhaustion and weariness.

XX

He is kept concealed--for though Turkish vigilance is somewhat relaxed in Shechem--there would be short shrift for the slayer of Hamid, were he known to be living still. Perhaps it may be because of this, that though his wounds slowly heal, John grows no stronger. A Jewish surgeon, related to Benjamin Sebastia, who is brought by stealth to see the patient, examines him, and goes away, shaking his head.

"Too late! It would always have been too late, however soon you had called me," he says to Sebastia as he takes his leave. "The man must have had a giant's strength to live through such an ordeal. My brother was a powerful man, yet he died under the rods.... Heart a wreck! ... Lungs.... Pff! ... May die at any moment! ... _Shalôm!_ To the Downfall of the Ottoman Power, and the Restoration of Jewry!" and he drains his glass of Palestine Tokay and refuses his fee, and goes. And his verdict is cautiously broken to John Hazel, who comforts weeping Esther, declaring the opinion of a Hebrew in a _kaftan_ and fur hat and side-curls, with a Paris Diploma--not worth a British damn! He is even a shade better next day, as though in sheer defiance of the owner of the Paris Diploma and the side-curls and _kaftan_....

He has known how the months change by the flowers that Esther brings him, and others that Inaini, smiling, produces from the folds of her veil. Great clusters of crimson anemones, crocuses, purple and white; grape hyacinths, tulips and daffodils--and it is March. More anemones of varied, jewel-bright colours, purple, pink, and crimson; jonquils, and white and yellow Marguerites. Yellow, blue and lilac lupins--narcissus and violets, iris and cyclamen--and wealthy April's here.... He likes the anemones and looks at them for hours, drowsily turning them in his well-nigh helpless hands.... For the creamy ones are like Katherine's skin, and the rose-red are her blushes, and the brown-gold are--or so he thinks--the colour of her eyes.... The rows of velvety hairs that fringe the centre of the corolla are black as her eye-lashes--black as her hair.... But the scent of violets brings her back, complete in her sweet womanliness, with the Chapel and Kerr's Arbour for a background to it all....

Now come great sheaves of lilies, phlox and gladioli, and it is May, the Month of the Rose. Masses of perfume, colour and fragrance are brought to the cellar in the jeweller's back-yard. And John plays with them, or stares at the whitewashed wall, or listens as Esther reads to him from a copy of the Jewish Scriptures, a volume belonging to their host, printed in Hebrew and Arabic. The Messianic Prophecies are what he hears most gladly, and oftenest asks for. One day as she closes the Book at the end of a passage from Isaiah:

"_And He was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities, and the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed._"

"That--that is why it was said to me that night!--" she hears the slow voice whisper: "'Thou hast suffered for obedience to thy father's fathers, and for the keeping of the Oath, and for the love of one woman. But I, that I might do the Will of My Father--and thy Father--and for the love of all mankind.'"

"O my Cousin!" Habitually now, the soft Arabic speech flows to and fro between them, "Who was it said those words to thee? ..."

"It was on the night--" the scarred head turns on the high-propped pillow--"the night after the beating. My hands and feet were torture, and I had a great thirst. And there came a light on the wall of the hut, and Somebody spoke to me, and the blood cleared from my eyes, and I saw Him then...."

"Who--who was He?" She draws an awed breath.

"He said He was my Friend--and I believed Him. You could not see Him as I did--and doubt any more. Dost thou recall the fresco in the tomb on Ebal? It is not like--how could it be His likeness? But the man who made it had seen Him in a Vision, and caught the faintest shadow of His look."

"I--do not understand...."

"It does not matter. But that is why I was so sure I should not die just then.... I cannot yet enter Jerusalem, for there is blood upon my hands that has been shed in vengeance--but, I am to wait near the City until I get the Sign...."

"Dearest, art thou quite sure--"

"I doubt not, being certain. Now, having breath enough--I would speak of other things. When I am dead, thou wilt write and tell the things to my mother--and go to thine own mother at Alexandria. She is wealthy and so art thou, thou dost need no provision, so the Fortune of Eli Hazaël, our grandfather, will go to build and endow the Hebrew University."

"But thy brother, Maurice, what of him?"

"It is borne in on me," the black eyes are momentarily dimmed, "that Maurice is dead. I have felt it for a long time. My mother must be sorely grieved. He was her dearest son."

"Art thou not dear to her also?" Esther asks sadly.

"She will sorrow for me too--but not as she does for Maurice. And she has a good friend, an old flame,--a Dutchman in the City, Herman Van Ost his name is--and she will marry him now. She would have married him years ago, but Maurice did not wish it. There is another task for thee yet, my Sweet. Dost thou shrink from it, Little One?"

"Nay. For thou art Hazaël, and the Head of our House. Surely I will obey thee. Have thou no doubt of me! ..."

"Kind One! ... Brave One! Little Judith in Israel!-- Surely thou wilt be rewarded for thy courage and thy faith. Listen now! ... When I who am the littlest and least of all the Hazaëls shall be gathered to our fathers--thou shalt seek out Katharine Forbis--wherever thou shalt hear of her--and carry word from me." The voice deepens and grows strong: "Say--there is no longer an Hazaël left of the male line, to guard the Ashes. The Oath is fulfilled--the Debt is paid! Katharine and her children--and theirs following them--must take upon them to be Guardians of the Shrine."

"What Oath was it?"

"The Oath made sixteen hundred years ago and more, by Hazaël Aben Hazaël. Remember!--she is to take the Urn back to Kerr's Arbour, and house it under the altar in the Chapel there.... And her children will reverence it--knowing its sacredness. Perhaps," the black eyes are shining now with a light that is soft and gentle, "perhaps there will be a little boy--with eyes like his mother's--who will ask for the story oftener and love it more than the others--because--because--his name will be John ..."

"Ah, dearest!--dearest! ..."

"Do not cry. All this when I have departed.... Till then I would be forgotten by all I used to know."

"Then thou wilt say I have done right when I tell thee that some two months back--when thou wert very feeble--diligent search was made for thee. Even under the eyes of the Turks and Germans--a man whom thou knowest ventured into this place."

"One whom I know! ..." The black eyes flash, the scarred head turns towards her on the pillow: "Is his name Yaill?"

"His name is Colonel Edward Yaill, though sometimes he calls himself the Emir Fadl Anga. He was garbed as a Moghrabi sugar-merchant--but I knew his eyes again. So I sought him out, and guessing at thy pleasure in the matter, I told him thou couldst not be moved--and he went away from here."

"It is well. Now I talk no more, sweetheart, for breath is hard to come by. Do one thing that I ask before the daylight goes. Take off thy veil, little Judith, and let me see thee plainly. For once! I will not ask again, if my asking hurt thee so!"

She falters a refusal, then yields at his entreaty.

"Shut thine eyes for a little moment, and open when I call...."

He shuts his eyes and opens them, to see Esther sitting at the bed-foot.... A figure girlish in its youth fulness, pathetic in its slender fragility, and veilless, save for the tresses of her rich black silken hair. She parts the hair with two little brown hands, then throws it back on either side, revealing the face it has covered--and a sob catches in the man's throat, and his eyes are wet with tears....

For that side of Esther's face that is never shown is beautiful, strangely beautiful. The great dark eye under the arched black eyebrow, the little aquiline nose, with proud curved nostrils, the delicate mouth, the rounded chin, are of purest Hebrew type. She bears his scrutiny awhile, then lifts the discarded covering, adjusts it with quick, slender hands--and is Ummshni once again.

"Will that do? Hast thou looked enough?" she asks with a touch of sharp regret for her lost heritage of Beauty.

"I have looked.... And I have seen--as I knew I should!" says John placidly, "that thy face, my little Esther--is lovely as thy soul. Now I will rest, for I am done. Perhaps I shall walk to-morrow...."

Comes the month of June, with ardent suns, and July with skies of fire. Esther reads to John in another Book--a copy of the Syriac Gospels picked up on a stall in the Bazâr--of One Whose teachings she has been reared to hold as rank blasphemy. But her Hazaël has commanded it, and she obeys Hazaël, and reads of Him Who raised the dead to life, and opened the eyes of those born blind, and made the lame to walk. Here in this land of Palestine nearly two thousand years ago. But time goes on and this lame man does not walk yet....

It is October, the month of Asphodel, and Shechem is swept clean of Germans and Turks, as the brown line moves up north. The great Commander-in-Chief of the E.E.F. has carried out his leopard-pounce on Nazareth,--whence Von Sanders and his Headquarters Staff have fled--Tiberias and Amman have been occupied by British Forces, and the stronghold of Turkish Power at Damascus has fallen, before the colossal, tottering bulk can balance on its feet.

No available garments of European make can be adapted to John's hugeness. Esther and the jewel-dealer's wife are in despair, then hit upon a brilliant idea. A vast pair of Turkish drawers of yellow and white striped-cotton are tucked into the baggy tops of immense soft yellow boots. Over an Arab _jubba_ of white cotton material goes a loose-sleeved Arab over-robe of brown camel-hair. They cover him with a black felt _tarbûsh_, and a white silk _kuffiyeh_ bound with a scarlet head-rope, and swathe him in the voluminous folds of a primrose-coloured _jerd_. Now, with the beard that he has grown in captivity at Shechem, the mother at home in London would not know her son again.

The German Commander with his merry men departed in haste for Aleppo when the huge khaki torrent rolled upon Samaria from the South.... The Turks of the garrison escaped over Jordan, the batteries on the flank of Ebal were taken by the British, and the Patriarchs and other notables deported from the Holy City are chartering vehicles to take them back again.

Some of these are quaint enough. To witness, the ancient travelling-landau, piled with luggage of a heterogeneous description, packed with Armenian Fathers, and drawn by a tall camel and a small, rebellious mule. But the hooded bath-pony-chair of largest size, a venerable derelict of British make left by some wealthy traveller years ago to moulder in the courtyard of a Shechem hotel, to which a diminutive red-tasselled donkey has been harnessed, and in which is seated a prodigiously obese and bushy-bearded Arab, possibly takes the palm....

Three women run beside the chair, drawn by the small donkey driven by an Arab urchin with a sharpened palm-wood stick. As the chair rolls through the east gate, and moves in the rolling dust-cloud with a column of other vehicles, past the Wired Place and the Mohammedan Tombs, the little donkey stops.

"_Shalôm, Sidi_! Health and recovery be thine--and Happiness with the Blessing!" says the wife of the jewel-dealer, bidding John Hazel farewell.

"Farewell, O woman of gentle heart.... Remember me to thy husband. And farewell, kind Inaini.... Sometimes remember us! ..."

"Farewell, my lord.... My lord will not soon forget Shechem!" says Inaini, with a flash of brilliant eyes and teeth from between her flowered veils....

"Nor thee. May the Most High reward thee for all thy charity! ..."

"It was nothing!" says the woman, almost sullenly, but John can hear her sob....

"O my friend! O my sister! Farewell, good-bye! Little Mother of Ugliness, my heart is sore to part! ..."

The jewel-dealer's wife hugs the little white-robed figure. Esther embraces her, and then Inaini--and the honest woman and the courtesan go away together, both red-eyed with weeping behind their shrouding veils. And the big bath chair drawn by the little donkey--with the huge Arab in it and the little woman and the native boy running beside it--is lost in the stream of traffic on the Jerusalem-Shechem Road.

It is a day of dust and sun, and the big man in the bath chair drawn by the little donkey is as feeble as he is heavy, and unfitted to bear fatigue. It is night by the time they have left the plain, and the road climbs amongst the hills, that are ridged and furrowed with the traces of War, as the face that is shaded by the white _jerd_, and the body that the sick heart's throbbing shakes, and the man's misshapen hands and feet are scarred by the Turkish _asayisi_....

Sunset flames over the Western Sea and all the land is rosy-dyed when at last he looks on the ancient City, the bourne of his desires. Set between east and west upon three hills, of which the lesser, Ophel, has vanished--the limestone spurs of Sion and Moriah upholding her, she turns her back upon the ocean plain and the mild damp airs that blow from it, to fill her lungs with the burning winds and dust-storms of the Wilderness--where the Son of God and Saviour of mankind was tempted of Satan, and Jordan's yellow waters flow towards the abyss of the Dead Sea.

They go no farther that night, for the sick man cannot bear it, but hire two rooms, almost clean, and newly whitewashed, at the Khân of a little mud-built Mohammedan village that sits on a hill beside the road.

The left wing of the London Division were entrenched here before the Occupation, and the Advance that moved them north.... The whitewash of the Khân of Shafât has familiar names scribbled upon it, attached to caustic comments on the price of native eggs, dates, cheese, oranges and olives, as compared with their quality and their size.

And here the little party stay. For the big man in the bath chair can travel no farther. Many days pass and he can move again; and the little donkey is harnessed to the chair by its tasselled traces, and the Arab boy with the palm-stick, and the little veiled woman run by it--and the queer _cortége_ halts by and by where the broad dusty track that leads south and a shade west to the Damascus Gate, forks off on the left to the less broad, better-kept carriage way that--following the line of the mountain-ridge, leads--south and a trifle east--to the Mount of Olives, passing the Tombs of the Kings.

In the shadow of the south wall of the royal enclosure, the sick man signifies his wish to halt. All day he lingers there, content, and for the greater part in silence; shares with his meek nurse and the Arab boy such food as they have with them--and when the short dusk heralds Dark, is loth to leave the spot. Next day they are there again--and the next day and the next. It is here, he signifies to his patient nurse, that the Message he waits will reach him--and content that Hazaël should be content, she knows no other will.

XXI

Meanwhile, the period of stagnation past, the current of life begins to flow within and around Jerusalem. In the house of an English Protestant Missionary Society without the walls, a Division has its Headquarters. At the Sign of the Red Triangle, guides may be obtained for the reverent conduct of soldier-visitors to the Holy Places. Here also photographs for the folks at home, with lightning hair-cuts and shaves, can be supplied with light refreshments. Signboards along the Jaffa Road invite Crusaders from the Land of the Ifrangi to partake at their own peril of sweets, ices and cakes.... And a Divisional Theatre flourishes in a tin-roofed shed, outside the Gate of Jaffa, and a Cinema established in a ramshackle booth is nightly packed to the walls.

Though the trenches and gun-emplacements on the Mount of Olives and Mount Scopas yet speak of War, there are local tennis-parties on badly neglected lawns, and even small dances to the accompaniment of the gramophone. The donkey-boys and Cook's tourists are no more.... But there are Military Races and Military Sports; and divers favourites, human and equine, are duly backed by the men of the Expeditionary Army....